Frye Gaillard shares some favorites in 'The Books That Mattered'

MOBILE, Alabama -- Frye Gaillard lives his life surrounded by books. Since 1978, Gaillard, the current writer in residence at the University of South Alabama, has written more than 20 books, garnering a slew of awards, including most recently the prestigious Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction Writing from the University of Alabama. His latest contribution to the writerly world is a tidy volume of essays that celebrate the influence of books on his life.

It’s a truism — one shared by the likes of best-selling novelist Stephen King, screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin, and 7th grade English teachers from sea to shining sea — that reading good books makes you a better writer. Gaillard’s “The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir” makes it clear how his own writing is shaped by the 30 titles he considers. This book is a kind of hybrid, filled with deeply personal anecdotes alongside literacy criticism. It is also a cri de coeur for the book and its place in the world.

Gaillard writes that his earliest exposure to books was disappointing. He found that fairy tales, filled with their witches and goblins and heavy doses of symbolism, were frequently bested by the stories told by his grandparents and other relatives, particularly an aunt named Mary. “For me as a child, listening to her stories was pure joy,” he writes. “And at least for the first ten years of my life it simply never occurred to me that anything this good could happen in a book.”

Then along came “Johnny Tremain,” the best-selling young-adult book chronicling the Revolutionary War written by Esther Forbes. “He seemed so real in his flashes of arrogance and disdain,” Gaillard writes of the title character, “so completely believable to a reader like me, just a few years younger and thus drawn easily into his world.” From that point on, Gaillard writes, he understood the power of a good book.

Gaillard’s list of influential books is a mix of both well-regarded and obscure titles. The essentials — Twain, Steinbeck, Robert Penn Warren, Harper Lee, even Kurt Vonnegut — are, of course, included. But there is also a hefty number of lesser-known works. It would be tempting, perhaps, to relegate these titles to a final, “also-ran” section. Instead, Gaillard integrates these books seamlessly into his narrative. For example, in the chapter “Southern Voices,” he explores a long line of Southern female writers who, as he states, “compelled a more honest” look at the society around them. Carson McCuller’s sympathetically rendered “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,” a book that Richard Wright compared to the very best of both Faulkner and Hemingway; Eudora Welty’s “eight-page epic” about the tortured journey of an elderly black woman, “The Worn Path”; and Harper Lee’s unforgettable, timeless figures, Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson, are all part of this literary tradition.

Gaillard also gives deserved praise to Lillian Smith for her influential and highly controversial book, “Killers of the Dream.” Published in 1949, the book was a thoroughgoing critique of Jim Crow and life in the segregated South, written by a woman raised in Georgia. “There had simply never been a book — certainly not one by a white Southern author — that confronted so directly the prevailing way of life in the South,” he writes.

The History Museum of Mobile, located at 111 S. Royal Street, will host Frye Gaillard for a reading and signing of “The Books that Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir” on Sept. 18 from 6-8p.m. For more information, call 251-208-7652

Reading about the books that made an impact on Gaillard gives a tremendous amount of insight into his writings. His simultaneous appreciation of place, race and culture is reminiscent of Mobile-born author Albert Murray, whom Gaillard writes about with deep admiration. There are others as well, including highly personal accounts like Larry L. King’s “The Old Man and Lesser Mortals” and Alex Haley’s “Roots,” both of which seem to influence “Lessons from the Big House,” Gaillard’s acclaimed foray into his own genealogy. Of Haley’s sprawling epic, he writes that he found “a measure of inspiration in what he had left us, in the way he embodied as fully as any writer I know that universal need to know where we came from — to connect our own story to something even larger, and thus to enrich it.” Like Gaillard’s own works, many of the books in his list address issues of race in America, including titles by Richard Wright and James Baldwin, two black American writers whose works Gaillard first encountered during the 1960s.

It would be difficult to level too much criticism at a book that is this subjective, particularly when Gaillard readily points out that his list of influential titles is filled with mostly journalists and Southern writers. “And where are the authors from other lands?” he asks. “Where are Homer, Chaucer, Hemingway, or Proust? These are questions for which I have no answer.” In the end, his list does not require much defending, least of all from me (of the 30 books he discusses, I’ve read 17). As M.J. Adler, author of “How to Read a Book,” once said, “In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”

It’s clear that these 30 “Books That Mattered,” and countless more, no doubt, matter still to Frye Gaillard. They matter to him each time he sits down to write. And that’s the point, really. The researching, writing, reading, discussing and critiquing of books matter. Books matter. They matter a great deal, indeed. 

Scotty E. Kirkland is curator of history at the History Museum of Mobile. He may be reached at sekirkland@yahoo.com.